There have been 58 homicides in the District of Columbia so far this year, down more than 20 percent from this point in 2008. And while every murder is a tragedy among the victim’s immediate circle, we all know that few cases — unless the deceased happens to be a government intern — even register on the consciousness of society at large. Not so the death of Stephen T. Johns, a 39-year-old “gentle giant” of a man who was shot dead shortly before 1 p.m. on Wednesday. It was not who Johns was that landed his name on front pages around the country, it was what and where he was that mattered: a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And while any museum shooting is inherently a big news event, the hot-button nature of this particular institution and the whacked-out beliefs of the alleged killer, James W. von Brunn, not only assured full-press coverage but led to all manner of tangential debate on everything from gun control to British politics to Internet ethics.
But at least, in a moment of sorrow, we could count on the denizens of the blogosphere to forget their partisan bickering and come together over basic human decency, right? Sorry, just kidding …
On the blogs, discussion of the Holocaust museum shootings quickly divided along partisan lines.
“James von Brunn just happened to be a ‘birther,’ one of the nuts who believe that Obama wasn’t born here, his birth certificate is fake, and he thus isn’t eligible to be president,” writes Salon’s Joan Walsh. She continued:
Ironically, a great example of the right-wing echo chamber’s bullying came when they managed to smack down the release of a Department of Homeland Security report about the rise of right-wing extremism. Judging from the right’s rhetoric, you’d have thought Janet Napolitano was suggesting rounding up Rush and his dittoheads and putting them in an old Japanese-American internment camp or something. But in fact, as Susan Page explained today on “Hardball,” the calm nine-page report merely looked at warning signs for extremism, based on history: They include a prolonged economic downturn, the demonization of immigrants, the election of the first black president, fears about losing the right to own guns, a banking crisis inciting age-old paranoia about “Jewish cabals” and the return of many veterans to the States suffering from PTSD and other conditions while getting insufficient care …
Will any of them apologize to Napolitano now? Dream on.
And who will apologize to the family of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the brave security man at the Holocaust Museum shot by von Brunn?
The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent is drinking from the same well:
Remember the enormous controversy that erupted in April over a Department of Homeland Security report that assessed the threat of “right wing extremists”? The story provoked days of nonstop cable chatter, forcing DHS chief Janet Napolitano to ultimately apologize.
Today, a gunman entered the Holocaust Museum and exchanged fire with security guards, leaving one in grave condition. MSNBC reports that the suspected gunman is connected to anti-government and white supremacist groups. If that proves correct, perhaps it’ll be time to revisit all that criticism of the DHS report. Right?
This passage from the DHS report in particular sparked a huge outpouring of rage on the right:
Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.
Conservatives looked at this passage and decided it was about them. But this report, which repeatedly talked about lone wolf types, was warning local law enforcement authorities about people exactly like this alleged gunman. And this is the second such incident this month, following the murder of Dr. Tiller.
As was Doug J. at Balloon Juice. “How many acts of right-wing terrorism have to occur before DHS is allowed to start keeping track of it?” he asks. “I really don’t get the conservative reaction to the original DHS pronouncement. No one is trying to lump angry Red State commenters in with honest-to-God terrorists…except, weirdly enough, the Red State commenters themselves. There are crazy people out there shooting up abortion clinics and Holocaust museums. These people identify with causes normally described as right-wing. Deal with it. Tea bag away to your heart’s content. It’s not til you start plotting to kill people that DHS should take an interest. If anyone starts spying on you prior to that, then I, the ACLU, and dirty hippies everywhere will support your grievances.”
The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle, however, thinks the water may be tainted: “At 12:52 P.M., an 88-year-old white supremacist walked into the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and opened fire. At 2:56 P.M., Greg Sargent was arguing that the shooting means ‘it’s time to revisit criticism of ‘right-wing extremists’ report.’ Sheesh. I really miss the good old days–when it took at least three hours before the cheap political point-scoring started.”
With another day to think it over, Zengerle stuck to his big point but walked back the argument a tad:
The murder of Stephen Tyrone Johns by James Von Brunn was a political act. That said, I think it’s premature to start making political arguments about the shooting a mere two hours after it occurs–especially if the arguments are being directed at people who didn’t have anything to do with the shooting. I’m as sick of Michelle Bachman and Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin as anyone, but, frankly, I have a hard time seeing how their (stupid and misguided and unfair) criticisms of the DHS report led or even contributed to Johns’s shooting. And, unless it’s discovered that those criticisms did play a role (by, say, prompting the DHS or the FBI or some other law-enforcement agency to stop monitoring Von Brunn because it feared political criticism for doing so), then I don’t think it’s worth bringing these people up–at least not almost immediately after someone is shot. I mean, a white supremacist nutjob walks into the Holocaust Museum, guns down a security guard, and people’s immediate response is to think about what some idiot said on a mindless Fox News show two months ago?! I just thought a little more time should have passed before something this terrible got turned into yet another, frivolous cable debate segment.
And Reason’s Jesse Walker looks at the D.H.S. report in a far broader context:
So the Department of Homeland Security, a bloated and dysfunctional agency that shouldn’t exist in the first place, should spend its time tracking the possibility that a criminal kook with no co-conspirators will decide to shoot a doctor or a security guard? From preventing another 9/11 to preventing unorganized shootings: Talk about mission creep. Yes, these murders are terrorism, but they’re the sort of terrorism that can be contained by the average small-town police force. If you try to blow them up into a grand pattern that threatens ordinary Americans, you’re no different from the C-level conservative pundits who treat every politically motivated crime by a Muslim as evidence of a broad Islamic threat to ordinary Americans’ well-being.
Why did the DHS report come under such fire? It wasn’t because far-right cranks are incapable of committing crimes. It’s because the paper blew the threat of right-wing terror out of proportion, just as the Clinton administration did in the ’90s; because it treated “extremism” itself as a potential threat, while offering a definition of extremist so broad it seemed it include anyone who opposed abortion or immigration or excessive federal power; and because it fretted about the danger of “the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities.” (Note that neither the killing in Kansas last month nor the shooting in Washington yesterday was committed by an Iraq or Afghanistan vet.) The effect isn’t to make right-wing terror attacks less likely. It’s to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the right, just as the most substantial effect of a red scare was to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the left. The fact that communist spies really existed didn’t justify Joseph McCarthy’s antics, and the fact that armed extremists really exist doesn’t justify the Department of Homeland Security’s report.
Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money, raises an interesting hypothetical:
If radical Muslims had carried out terrorist attacks in Kansas and Washington DC over the past five days, we might be trying to pass legislation giving the president the legal authority to place people in preventive detention, and Daniel Pipes would be implying that we need to round up Arab-Americans (correction: Muslims) and put them in relocation camps.
But it was only a couple of old white guys, so our civil liberties remain unthreatened.
The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer takes that ball and runs with it:
There’s been a startling trend of fringe-right violence recently, from Richard Poplawski to Scott Roeder and now James Von Brunn. But we view these instances of violence as the acts of deranged individuals rather than of groups because they are white men. Campos’ hypothetical isn’t mere snark, Michelle Malkin wrote an entire book defending the internment on the basis of race in the case of Japanese internment during World War II. Cliff May argued that torture is justified against Muslims because they’re Muslim. Republicans have opposed the transfer of terrorists to American prisons on the grounds that our prison facilities might not be able to hold them, and Ed Morrisey is apparently planning his vacation around avoiding the recently relocated Chinese Uighurs. Imagine what attempting to close Gitmo, banning torture, or even withdrawing from Iraq would look like in the aftermath of three attacks perpetrated by Muslim rather than right-wing extremists.
Campos’ post implies an unsettling question. How much of the call for “extraordinary measures” in fighting terrorism has to do with the unique challenges of fighting global terrorism, and how much of it has to do with an irrational, orientalist fear of all things Arab and Muslim?
If that’s not partisan enough for you, how’s this? “Von Brunn and Ronald Reagan: How many degrees of separation?” asked Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog.
The answer is two. But first, let me explain why I’m bringing this up.” He explains: “One of von Brunn’s pals had worked in the Reagan White House. I’m not saying that Reaganite conservatism is indistinguishable from neo-Nazism, or that one inevitably leads to the other — I don’t believe that at all. I’m just saying that if you’re going to walk out on the loony ledge where people like von Brunn and Blodgett congregate, it’s highly unlikely you’re going to approach that ledge from the left. I’ve read a lot about von Brunn and his crowd in the past 24 hours; funny, I haven’t read about any ideological soul mate who joined this movement after being part of SDS, or the Mobe, or Gene McCarthy’s campaign, or George McGovern’s (or Howard Dean’s or Obama’s or Kucinich’s, or MoveOn, for that matter).
Debbie Schlussel checks in from an entirely different universe altogether:
Much is being made by Muslims and their many defenders on the left–and the ignoramus “conservatives” at Hot Air (who lecture us that hate has no ideological bounds, which I already learned not from those clueless ones, but from Sarah Palin e-mails wishing me cancer)–that the shooter of several people (one now dead) at the U.S. Holocaust Museum is not a Muslim but a White guy, James W. Von Brunn, who is a neo-Nazi.
But that is a distinction without a difference. In fact, it is because of Muslims–who are the biggest contributor to the worldwide rise in anti-Semitism to Holocaust-eve levels–that neo-Nazis feel comfortable–far more comfortable!–manifesting their views about Jews. Until 9/11 and our resulting new tolerance for Islam, the neo-Nazi types were marginalized and howling at the wind. We know who has been targeting Jewish museums and centers affiliated with Jews in recent years. And it hasn’t been, in general, 89-year-old White guys …
Make no mistake. Muslims created this atmosphere where hatred of the Jews is okay and must be “tolerated” as a legitimate point of view. The shooting today is just yet another manifestation emanating from that viewpoint–another manifestation of the welcome mat that Muslims rolled out for fellow anti-Semites of all stripes to no longer be afraid to come out of the closet.
Moreover, not only do White supremacists and neo-Nazis work with Muslims in many, many documented cases and investigations. But they are basically one and the same. The only difference is that one guy is named James and the other guy is named Ahmed. And the former only has a few thousand discredited, marginalized compatriots.
Even for Jeffrey Goldberg, no fan of Muslim popular sentiment, this was bit much:
Maybe this was meant to be a parody, I don’t know. I’ve never read Debbie Schlussel before. But if it’s meant seriously, then it’s ridiculous. White Christians have done an excellent job being anti-Semitic for several hundred years — almost a couple of thousand, actually — without any help whatsoever from Muslims. In fact, it is Muslim Jew-haters who rely on the publications of European and white American anti-Semites — most notably the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the International Jew — for inspiration. I hope Schlussel retracts this absurd piece of “analysis.” Does she have any idea what this country was like in the 1930s? I don’t think Muslims dominated the German Bund.
Jonah Goldberg, writing at National Review, sees a media conspiracy:
Never mind that von Brunn isn’t a member of the far right. Nor is he a member of the far left, as some on the right are claiming. He’s not a member of anything other than the crazy caucus. Von Brunn’s True North is conspiratorial anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. He’s not a member of the Christian Right. In fact, he denounces Christianity — just as Hitler did — as a Jewish plot against paganism and Western vigor. Nor is he a capitalist. Again, just as Hitler did, he hails socialism as the solution to the West’s problems.
Still, if we are going to play this game where we take the words of politicians and pundits, compare them to the words of murderers and psychopaths, and then assign blame accordingly, then let’s blame the New York Times, Chris Matthews, left-wing blogs everywhere, and the academics who penned The Israel Lobby (which blames a fifth column of Israel loyalists for our troubles).
After all, for years, mainstream liberalism and other outposts of paranoid Bush hatred have portrayed neoconservatives — usually code for conservative Jews and other supporters of Israel — as an alien, pernicious cabal.
While Times columnist Paul Krugman temporarily abandons trade deficits and budget projections to take on a couple of the left’s favorite bogeymen:
At this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.
Exhibit A for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism is Fox News’s new star, Glenn Beck. Here we have a network where, like it or not, millions of Americans get their news — and it gives daily airtime to a commentator who, among other things, warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s “totalitarian” agenda (although he eventually conceded that nothing of the kind was happening).
And then there’s Rush Limbaugh. His rants today aren’t very different from his rants in 1993. But he occupies a different position in the scheme of things. Remember, during the Bush years Mr. Limbaugh became very much a political insider. Indeed, according to a recent Gallup survey, 10 percent of Republicans now consider him the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today,” putting him in a three-way tie with Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich. So when Mr. Limbaugh peddles conspiracy theories — suggesting, for example, that fears over swine flu were being hyped “to get people to respond to government orders” — that’s a case of the conservative media establishment joining hands with the lunatic fringe.
“You can’t accuse Beck or Limbaugh of inciting violence,” writes Krugman’s online colleague Judy Warner, who then proceeds to do pretty much exactly that: “But they almost certainly do stoke the flames. They may give people who are just about to go over the edge — the sort of “guy that could not take it anymore” as one poster on the white supremacist forum Stormfront.org, described von Brunn — some sort of validation for their rage.”
Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin thinks the Timespersons are way off base:
For Krugman and others to seize on the case of neo-Nazi James W. Von Brunn as a rationale for ranting against Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and actor Jon Voight is the height of absurdity. Nothing they have said or done is even remotely connected to this murderous nut or anyone else who might share his anti-Semitic views. Indeed, Von Brunn probably considered that trio to be the enemy as much as Obama, since they are all stalwart supporters of Israel.
But the most egregious aspect of Krugman’s sham case for blaming the political Right for extremist violence is the fact that he and other liberals ignore the third case of political violence that recently occurred in this country: the shooting of two U.S. soldiers in Arkansas by Abdulhakim Muhahid Muhammad — a Muslim extremist who claimed to be taking “revenge” for America’s “crimes” against Muslims. That incident has received paltry coverage by the mainstream media in contrast to the all-out approach to both Tiller’s murder and to the Holocaust Museum shooting. Krugman and company prefer to ignore it because it doesn’t fit into their ideological box, in which everyone who loudly disagrees with Obama or the left can, in some way, be linked to extremist nut jobs.
All this leads us to the big question: Does racist hate have an inherent political identification?
Reporting at the Politico, Ben Smith doesn’t think there’s any easy answer.
FBI agents visited the offices of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine yesterday after a shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and told employees they’d found the magazine’s address on a piece of paper associated with the shooter, James von Brunn, and asked whether the Standard had received any threats.
The magazine is about a mile north of the Holocaust Museum, and there’s no other indication that von Brunn had targeted it. Von Brunn’s published rants included attacks on “neocons,” and the Standard has been at the heart of the neoconservative movement.
The suggestion that the Standard may have been a target complicates any view of the racist shooter in contemporary left-right terms. Von Brunn’s white supremacist roots put him under the rubric of a “right-wing extremist,” but the substance of his views — which included everything from believing that President Bush may have been in on the September 11 attacks to denying that President Obama is an American citizen — are too far on the fringe to fit into conventional political classification.
Not so, writes Jonathan Chait at the Plank: “A certain strand of conservative thought is comfortable with most of the tenets of Republican doctrine with the exception of free trade and, especially, Jews, Israel, and neoconservative influence. Pat Buchanan is the emblem of this brand of conservatism. Buchanan is generally a Republican partisan except for Jewish/Israeli/Middle Eastern issues where he takes strong exception. Von Brunn is pretty clearly a violent and more extreme adherent of Buchanan’s basic worldview. That he would detest a neoconservative institution like the Standard isn’t “complicating” or surprising at all.”
Good points, yet not enough to convince to his own colleague James Kirchick:
Jon correctly identifies Brunn as essentially being “pretty clearly a violent and more extreme adherent of [Pat] Buchanan’s basic worldview,” that is, a racist, nativist, isolationist paranoid about the power of global elites (Jews). But where Jon is wrong, at least in my estimation, is his implication that these views are uniquely characteristic of the far right. They might have once been, but certainly are not anymore. Since 9/11, and to a lesser degree before that, similar views about Israel, the Middle East and “neocons” have been popularized by commentators on the fringe (and not-so-fringe) left. Indeed, they may even be more popular on the left than on the right (witness all the liberals who praised Ron Paul, an even more extreme version of Buchanan, during the 2008 presidential race, as being the “only” Republican willing to speak the truth). What makes Buchanan a stand-out figure is that he’s such a lone voice on the right today (why does he find a home on the liberal MSNBC and not on Fox News? Partly, I think, because so many of the station’s liberal hosts agree with him on matters of foreign affairs). All in all, I’d argue that the “fringe” right which subscribes to these views is no larger a component of contemporary conservativism than is the “fringe” left that subscribes to them a component of contemporary liberalism.
To be sure, Von Brunn is most certainly a “right-winger,” albeit an extreme one, as his ideology conforms to an American political tradition that was marginalized from the mainstream conservative movement in the 1950’s by William F. Buckley Jr. and others grouped around National Review. And Von Brunn’s racism and nativsm, not shared by the fringe left which subscribes to his foreign policy views, confirm his classification as a man of the Right. But the newfound affinity for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism among some elements of the left — and the fact that von Brunn might have been planning to shoot up the flagship publication of neoconservatism and not, say, the offices of Mother Jones — absolutley “complicates” the narrative that many liberals are cynically trying to construct around this tragedy.
At the risk of overpromoting the bright young folks at TNR, I’ll end with this more nuanced yet pointed post by Damon Linker:
How could Von Brunn be a right-winger, extreme or otherwise, when the Weekly Standard is a magazine of the right? Shouldn’t we just call him a deranged all-purpose hater and be done with it?
For the sake of political and intellectual clarity, it’s crucially important that we don’t do anything of the sort.
The American political spectrum is extremely narrow. For all the seriousness of the differences that separate Democrats and Republicans, both parties are thoroughly persuaded of the legitimacy of liberal democratic government. That’s a wonderful thing, since it’s produced long-lasting civil peace and stability.
But that very peace and stability, and the ideological narrowness that makes it possible, can also lead us to forget the persistent character of the anti-liberal left and anti-liberal right, with which we (unlike citizens in less fortunate regions of the world) have very little acquaintance. The anti-liberal left has historically been defined by the radical universalism of its principles, the anti-liberal right by its exclusionary (racial, ethnic, national) particularism. That is the primary difference between them. And that’s why Von Brunn is unmistakably a man of the anti-liberal right: he believes in a particularistic vision of the world in which Jews, blacks, neocons, people with low IQs, and sundry other classes and groups of people have been eliminated; on Wednesday, he made a small contribution to realizing this distinctively right-wing ideal.
This is also why I think Jamie Kirchick confuses matters by invoking the anti-Semitism of the left, which (though it may have similar psychological sources) is linked to very different ideas. For the far-left, Judaism (and especially Zionism) is offensive because of its particularism, its affirmation of ties to family, tradition, heritage, and nation. I’d say that this is even true for most of the anti-liberal leftists who have embraced the pseudo-particularism of radical multiculturalism. In the end, they take the side of the “other” mainly for the sake of undermining the authority of those currently in positions of political, economic, and military power — not because they actually want to “go native” and affirm the particularism of the downtrodden as if it were their own. (How many admirers of Edward Said actually go off and become strictly observant Muslims?) On the contrary, the ideal world of the radical multiculturalist would be one of complete cosmopolitan egalitarianism in which every group affirms its own beliefs while (somehow) equally affirming everyone else’s too. As for the few who take these ideas so far that they actually do “go native,” well, they’ve moved so far left that they’ve ended up on the right.
This analysis also helps us to understand some of our confusion in placing neoconservatives on the political spectrum. Neocons tend to be staunch American nationalists (making them right-wing), but their vision of Americanism consists of universalistic ideals and principles (placing them somewhere on the left — which is why left-leaning writers like Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens have expressed sympathy for some neocon ideas and policies). In this, and perhaps only in this, neoconservatism resembles the ideology of French republicanism, which also asserts the universalism of a particular nation’s ideals.
So, yes: Von Brunn is unambiguously a right-wing extremist.
Of course he is — if that’s the way you want to look at it …
(Note: Because of a crash in the computer system during editing, the original post contained an inaccurate description of Paul Campos’s post at Lawyers, Guns and Money.)
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